Monthly Archives: August 2009

My first impression on checking outZooloo was that it could fall into the category of YAWN — yet another whizzbang network. Would people have time for one more social entanglement?

I sprung the question to Zooloo’s CEO Jeff Herzog who was inexplicably swinging a golf club when I visited the the offices. In the age of smart pointing devices and tons of content, a club as an over-sized pointing device might be a good idea –in case I completely missed the point :-)

“Social is just one component,” he said, quickly focusing on the big differentiation: the fact that you could register, build and customize your digital footprint in a snap. ” Zooloo is a dashboard that brings together your digital and social life.”

In other words, a way to rein in internet clutter.

Like you, I am very suspicious of shiny new objects, and anything that promises to be game-changing, despite Herzog’s reputation for having created iCrossing.(Full disclosure here: I worked very briefly for iCrossing.) The mural on the wall (above), and toys strewn on the floor give you a sense that this is not your typical tech firm.

On the other hand, I work in an organization that uses a visualization space as a digital dashboard –a very large dashboard— so I know its potential in a data-rich world. But could a ‘dashboard for your digital life’ have enough takers?

For instance: How would a personalized social network be relevant to those people who did not spend their entire lives on the Net, I asked.

Long pause. “Who are they?” he asked.

We laughed.

I was thinking of teachers, and hair-dressers, and the mechanic at my car dealership, a coffee shop owner… I ask them all the time, and they think all this tweeting, and blogging is a waste of time.

“Even for someone who spends just one-third of his or her life online, a dashboard like this would make that one-third of time spent online very productive,” Herzog shot back. It is “just 15 percent of the experience.” What’s connected to it, what surrounds that dashboard, is what differentiates it.” Hard to disagree with that. Still, Zooloo as a pretty neat concept. If not exactly novel (with such tools as Page Flakes, and apps like Eventbox) it fills a huge need. If one of the four benefits work, we could be talking of Zooloo the way we once talked about other brands with double O’s in their name:

One digital address. It will be the home of your personal brand, and where you can be contacted — “your next cell phone number,” as Zoolooites call it.

Time management: Why spend all that time opening up Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo, Flickr and Gmail, when you can access and update all of them in one place?

Privacy filter: We struggle with whom we can share what. Grandma doesn’t need to see what we uploaded to SlideShare. My directors don’t need to see my vacation photos. One dashboard with many filters can take away this headache. My LinkedIn buddies don’t need to see my Google docs…

I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t let me embed WordPress. The default blogging app was clumsy, to say the least. MAybe we are spoiled with the streamlined WordPress and Typepad interfaces. In the next few weeks I will check it out a bit more, here. I’ll keep you posted.

iPadio is a nifty solution. It enables what is techniclaly called Phone Blogging. All you need to do is talk on your phone by calling a toll free number and using a PIN, and it live-streams the audio comment directly to your blog ! Nothing to download, too. How neat is that? When you listen to her comments you get a sense of the immediacy and spontaineity. This could easily be turned into a longer podcast. And because it was being streamed live, I could have been listening to it while interviewing her co-author — thereby creating an interesting feedback loop. Apparently there’s a way to post the audio file to Facebook, as well.

As Yang-May observes (since had been followed and participated in the Twinterview on her phone) these are the early manifestations of multi-channel, real-time communictaions. It also shows how easy it is becoming to connect the dots between different forms of communication.

I am testing it out this week. If you have used it, or a similar service, leave a comment. I would love to pick your brains.

I had a very stimulating conversation with an editor today and we talked about the motivation to take everything that’s ink on paper to an online platform.

So the question I had was, do those who salivate after the long tail value of content (be assured I am a champion of this) really think that the printed product will lose its audience?

After all, as the popular argument goes, why would anyone pick up a magazine or a paper, when they could read the same content on a mobile device or on a laptop?

My short answer to that: “experience.”

Anyone could duplicate the story, or even enhance it, for an online audience. But it’s no substitute for the print experience. Content that can be folded, torn, highlighted, photo-copied, taped to a wall, or slipped into a folder can never be substituted. Even on a digital reader.

Then there is our appetite for short-form and long-form journalism. Our brains are wired to shuffle between short content and in-depth stories; our eyes are trained to scan headlines, sidebars and info-graphics; our bodies trigger automatic responses to seeing large bold headlines of shocking news (like this and this).

To those who say, “yes, but newspapers are filled with yesterday’s news,” my response is that sometimes, the story the day after, put together by thoughtful editors, is what we really want. Could we forget the front pages of thistory –on 09/12?

When that United Airlines flight splash-landed in the Hudson, were you content having followed the tweets in real time? Or did you crack open the paper the next day to see how the ‘miracle’ unfolded?

As of this morning, the wires and other online media updated us on the passing of Ted Kennedy -a story that all ink-on-paper publications missed for obvious reasons. Would you skip the “old news” in tomorrow’s papers, or will you dive into those broad contextual pieces, timelines, photos, eulogies?

As I told my friend, the problem we are facing is people buying into idea (urban legend?) about people’s reading habits , and partly in the fancy notion that the opposite of the (printed) leave-behind is the (digital) long-tail.

I should be the last person to say this, but digital is not a great replacement for all communication. Some times it is a really bad choice; cutting back on newspapers will be a self-fulling prophecy feeding the idea rather than responding to the notion that “no one really reads!”

When you introduce yourself and what you do, do you use the word ‘generalist’ or ‘specialist’ to describe yourself?

I use neither, because I’ve always had problems with both terms. I am not saying both are wrong, but they have not been an ideal fit. Here is my problem:

A Generalist made me come across as trying to do a bit of this and a bit of that, and not really have in-depth knowledge of both ends. Maybe I was talking to a wrong audience. Maybe I was cut off by the person asking a question –this was before the concept of a 140-character pitch! – and did not have time to qualify with some details.

A Specialist sounded fancy at that time, but did not resonate with me because it made me feel like I was capable of one thing and one thing only. From my agency life I realized that a writer who doesn’t understand design, and a designer who doesn’t appreciate the nuances of language is not a great asset. Today’s specialists are different. I’ve met writers who are deep into interactive media, and web geeks who are podcasters and closet citizen journalist.

So my question to you is: What label best fits you –Generalist or Specialist? Or do you have a better one?

I am reminded of what Silvia Cambie, author and communicator told me when I interviewed her earlier this month. “The communicator of the future will need to be an integrator able to aggregate info and understand new cultural settings,” she said.

I was at the Social Media AZ conference last Thursday, and some of the well-known practitioners (note: everyone’s refraining from the word ‘experts’) seemed to affirm what I have been talking about. I also learned a lot in six hours.

One of my big lessons, and something I tend to articulate differently to my clients is that blogging and tweeting, in and of themselves, are nothing if they don’t connect the dots between other activities, content buckets, people, and online/offline properties.

A blog or a podcast will not automatically solve every communication issue. Unless you allow social media to leave ‘breadcrumbs’ between the different tactics, then all you might be doing is creating new silos.

I think of a blog as the second hub that has dotted lines –pointy arrows in, pointy arrows out– between branding, marketing, HR, PR, the people in the organization. Why? because this is what gives the content more depth and wider context.

WIRED’s electronic manhunt, a game to find a Evan Ratliff. Anyone who comes up with a clue will get a free subscription of the magazine.

Dan Wool, Co-editor of ValleyPRBlog, on social media hype and how strange it is that after 5-6 years of it being mainstream, we’re still screaming that the sky is falling.

“As the TV networks and hundreds of other businesses realized, computers could be used to impress people. A poll prediction looked much more accurate on computer print-out paper than in human handwriting.”

Cory Doctorov, on the earliest use of a ‘computer’ to predict election results, in the fifties sixties